An estimated 13 billion customers are served annually in full-service restaurants in the United States. The average wait time for a table at such restaurants during the peak hours when most customers arrive is estimated at 45 minutes. Since most restaurants will not hold a table for a patron if the patron leaves the area, the patron must wait at the restaurant for a table to become available. These long wait times can become tedious for the customer. At peak times, the restaurant may not have adequate space to accommodate all waiting customers, and waiting customers may thus be crowded or forced to stand for long periods, furthering the frustration felt by the customer due to the long wait. It is not known how many customers walked out of restaurants because the estimated wait time to be seated is too long, or who leave after waiting a certain period and no table is made available, although this number is thought to be very large. Stopping or reducing this loss of customer revenue is a matter of great importance to the restaurant industry. Many other service industries may also require service recipients to endure long wait times; for example, it is estimated that the average wait time for a patient in a non-emergency healthcare setting is between 20 minutes and 1 hour. While patients are perhaps less likely to forego medical treatment due to a long wait time than a restaurant customer is to forego seating at a particular restaurant, the results of doing so may be deleterious to the patient's health if, for example, a dangerous condition is left untreated.
It is a common practice today at many busier restaurants and other service providers to use specialized customer pager systems. The purpose of the pager system is to alert the customer when a table is available. In a crowded, noisy restaurant environment, these pager systems allow the customer to enter the bar area, wait outside, or otherwise move about in the general vicinity of the restaurant without fear that the customer will miss his or her table when it becomes available. The pager system thus allows the restaurant manager to more easily ensure that customers are seated in an orderly and efficient manner. Typically, the pager system comprises two types of components, a base unit and multiple individual pagers. The base unit sends a signal to the appropriate pager, and then that pager may light up, blink, vibrate, or emit an audible alert to indicate to the customer that a table is ready. Such systems are provided by various companies, including JTECH Communications, Inc. of Boca Raton, Fla. While such paging systems are useful for indicating to a customer when a table is ready in a noisy and crowded restaurant environment, they do little to alleviate the tedium of waiting for a table, or otherwise encourage a customer to wait for a table despite a significant delay, instead of simply seeking another restaurant or foregoing the dining out experience altogether.
The prior art does include attempts to alleviate the boredom of a customer waiting for a table at a restaurant. U.S. Pat. No. 5,999,088 to Sibbitt teaches an information display pager device that also provides active entertainment for persons waiting for service, such as at a restaurant. The pager features an active display, such as an LCD screen, and a static display, such as a printed area. The purpose of the static display is to provide instructions for using and controlling the active display. The active display may provide restaurant menu item listings, advertisements, news headlines, sports, weather, movie schedules, and entertainment news. The notification function of the pager, such as by light or audible alert, is not interrupted by the active display information, and continues to operate even when the active display is turned off by the user.
A significant disadvantage of the Sibbitt device is that each pager must be programmed with the appropriate entertainment or other information. This would be a time-consuming chore for the employees of the restaurant, and the associated cost would offset the revenue gains that might be felt as a result of fewer customers leaving due to a long service wait time. In addition, the need to program each pager with the appropriate information would limit the currency of the information being displayed. The cost and time involved would discourage frequent updates. What is desired then is a system that would provide entertainment and other information to customers or other service recipients waiting for service, while reducing or eliminating the programming time and cost associated with the update of information displayed by prior art devices. In addition, it would be highly desirable to provide a means of delivering advertising information by such a device, including either or both of third-party advertising and the advertising of the restaurant or other provider that is supplying the paging system for the use of its customers or other service recipients.